CONCERTS IN TEHRAN Tehran, the capital of Iran, a rather modern city of about four million people, close to the last years of the reign of the Shah—that is, about 1970. We are in a modern concert hall, have bought tickets, and sit in the seventh row; there are some twelve hundred seats, only half occupied. The audience is well dressed, in modern Western clothes; we see ladies in very fine dresses of Paris fashion, and we recognize academics, professional people, and a fairly large number of foreigners. We feel as if we were in a concert hall in an American city ready to hear a string-quartet concert. On the stage are a few chairs and some music stands. It seemed as if this experience were going to be very much like a concert of Western classical music, and in many ways that's how it turned out to be. There were printed programs, an intermission, and ensemble pieces that opened and closed the program, with a number of solos and duets played in between. The program tells us the names of the composers of some pieces, and the name of mode—in Persian, dastgah—of each piece. A bit late, six male musicians appear on the stage with instruments, are greeted with applause, and sit on the

chairs. They are dressed in costumes approximating the clothes one sees on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Persian miniatures. Shortly, without a conductor, they begin. The instruments are quite different from each other. There is a heavy-looking lute with long neck and frets, the tar, which turns out to be played with a pick; also a kamancheh, a spiked fiddle with a small round body and four strings, which is held upright on a peg like a miniature cello and bowed with the palm upward, like an early European viol player rather than a modem cellist. A trapezoidal zither or dulcimer, the santour, with seventy-two strings (tuned to twenty-seven different pitches), is played with two small balsa-wood mallets. A fourth player brings an ordinary Western violin, and a fifth, a cane flute, the ney, which he will play by blowing across the end (rather than across a hole in the side, as on the standard Western flute). Finally there is a drummer, who brings out a goblet-shaped drum with one skin, called dombak or zarb. These are most of the principal instruments of Persian classical music.

The Persian tar (left) and kemancheh (right)

The program says that the first section of the concert will be in the dastgah of Shur. I ask my neighbor what that means and am told that there are twelve dastgahs in Persian music, which provide the basic material for all music-making in the Persian classical system. Each has a scale or collection of pitches from which composers or improvisors make selections, and each has a unique configuration of intervals. But each dastgah also has a basic musical motif, a tune consisting of some five or six tones that characterizes it. My neighbor softly sings the main musical motif of Shur into my ear and says, "This is the heart of the dastgah of Shur; when you play Shur, you must always keep coming back to it, otherwise your audience will say you don't really know our music."

(Left) Darbucca, the most widely used drum type in the Middle East. (Right) Iranian zarb or dombak.

In the first piece, all of the musicians sitting behind music stands play together. (I strain to see whether they actually have music, and conclude that they either don't or are just barely looking at it.) They are playing a type of piece called pishdaramad, which means "before the introduction," composed by Darvish Khan, who I'm told was a great musician early in the century. They play in unison, but hardly perfect unison, and it is easy to pick out the flute's ornamented tune, the nasal voice of the kamancheh, the heavy plucked sounds of the tar, and the brilliant runs of the santour. The drummer keeps meter and tempo, and the piece is obviously in slow three-quarter time. As I make out the form, I discover that it has a theme that keeps coming back at intervals, a bit like an eighteenth-century European rondo, but also like some European instrumental folk music. The audience applauds. In the front are a few young men, music students from a conservatory, who wag their heads sideways and cry out gently, "Bah, baht".

DASTGAH: The mode or scale of a piece in Persian music. TAR: A long-necked lute. KAMANCHEH: A spiked fidcle played with a small round bow. SANTOUR: The Persian hammer dulcimer. DOMBAK or ZARB: BowI-shaped drum with a single head.

For the next section all the musicians remain on stage, but it is performed by only two of the group, the santour player and the drummer. The santour plays a very rapid piece in which a rhythmic pattern keeps being repeated as the basis of a short bit of melody, which is itself repeated many times with variations, alternates with other tunes, and eventually returns. All this is done with enormous emphasis on virtuosity. The santour player throws his arms around to show his expertise; halfway through, he takes out a cloth and places it over the strings to show that he can play correctly even without seeing the instrument. It is a great show. In all of this he is accompanied by the drummer, who takes a modest stance musically and physically. At those points when the audience hears something particularly difficult, it bursts into brief applause, while the musicians go on uninterrupted. The name of this kind of piece is chahar mezrab, which means "four picks" or "four hammers," possibly because it is so fast that it sounds as if there were four hands flying over the instrument. (An example of music in the dastgah of Shur may be heard in the recording Avaz in Shur.)

The santour, used in Iran and neighboring countries.

For the third selection, the group is joined by a female singer, who is greeted with enthusiastic applause. Dressed in modem evening dress, flamboyant and colorful, she sings, accompanied by the tar, music whose words, as my neighbor tells me, are a poem from the fourteenth century by Hafez, "our greatest poet." This section of the performance is called Avaz, and it is the part everyone has perhaps been waiting for. She sings short phrases, and I hear the motif of Shur (still sounding a bit out of tune to me, with its intervals that don't quite fit into the scale of our piano) at the beginning, and again at various times moving gradually from the low part of her range to the higher. The music has no beat, it sounds improvised. She has a strong, husky chest-voice, free of vibrato, but she uses lots of ornaments, and as she moves to the higher part of her range, the lines get longer and she dwells for two, three, then fifteen or twenty notes on one syllable. Eventually, she sings lines without using words at all, long

passages simply on "Aaah," with a tone that sounds like a combination of yodeling and sobbing, and the audience breaks into applause. Finally, after some fifteen minutes of singing, the performer allows her song to draw to a close, moving to lower pitches and softer sounds. The tar player has been accompanying her improvisation by playing what she sings, but lagging a note or two behind, and at the end of a phrase quickly repeating what she has just sung. (An example of a chahar mezrab, performed on santour, may be heard in Chahar Mezrab.) We have heard what is clearly the high point of the performance. The performance continues, with a number of different pieces, solo and ensemble. As we have already noted, in terms of the social context, this concert is like a concert of Western classical music, except for the instruments, the way the voice was used, the importance of unmetered rhythm, and the obvious importance of improvisation. The concert runs about ninety minutes and ends in time for the well-dressed middle-class audience to catch buses to their suburban homes. Before leaving, I tell my neighbor that it has been fan but that I was a bit puzzled. I had been told that Middle Eastern classical music is largely improvised, but here out of some ten movements, only one was clearly in that category. And I had thought that the music would be contemplative, but it struck me as more of a variety show. "Yes," my neighbor agreed, "but that's the modem way of performing Iranian classical music. But perhaps I can invite you to a place where they perform the same music in a much more traditional way." This concert introduced us to Persian classical music, but events somewhat like the one we've witnessed—traditional music in an essentially European social context—could have been heard elsewhere in the Middle East. But there are also many other kinds of formal performances of classical music. Let's briefly visit Istanbul, where we will attend a Turkish ayin (sometimes called fasti) in which musicians and dancers interact in a complex spiritual ritual belonging to Sufism, the mystical movement of Islam, that benefits themselves as well as the audience, but in different ways. The musicians play a group of composed and improvised pieces, and in several important sections they are joined by vocalists singing in unison. Meanwhile, the dancers, in white robes, whirl ceaselessly, turning and circling, and achieve a state of spiritual ecstasy while the audience looks on calmly and remains essentially passive. In another kind of classical concert, in Cairo (but it could have been Beirut or Baghdad in its better days), a world-famous singer, singing song after song, liberally amplified, accompanied by a small ensemble with drum, gradually establishes a close relationship with the audience of thousands. Through his emotional vocal passages, he moves them to react, applaud, cry out, respond to his improvisations, his nuanced ornaments, musical sighs and sobs, long virtuosic

AVAZ: In Persian classical music, the improvised, nonmetric section, performed vocally or instrumentally, that is central in the performance.

passages, with volumes from very soft to overpowering, and emphases. And he in turn is inspired by these reactions, as performer and audience interact and seem to become unified. It's interesting to compare these three concerts, for large audiences, of Middle Eastern classical traditions. Variants of all of them could be heard in many parts of the area. The kinds of music they include aren't all that different; the social context—a public concert in a large auditorium, performances on stage, listeners in assigned seats—is esentially the same. But the relationship of musicians and audience, the emotional participation of the audience, and the spiritual interaction of musicians and dancers are very different, and they show us some of the great variety of musical experience available in Middle Eastern cultures. But my neighbor in Tehran had told me he would take me to an event in which the musical experience was very different from that of large concert hall. The invitation was long in coming, but finally I was asked to appear at dinnertime on a particular evening at an address in the wealthier section of northern Tehran. It was made clear that I should not (as would most Americans) bring along wife, daughter, or date, but that I should come alone, and that being invited to this gathering was a rather special thing. Those who attend this kind of event—called a majles, a word that denotes a private concert, but which actually just means something like "sitting around"—don't usually accept outsiders into their midst. A bit apprehensive, I showed up. It was a modern home, but in the living room there were no chairs, and six men were sitting in a circle leaning against large pillows. Three of them were wearing loose, pajama-like garments. I recognized two of them, one a physicist and the other a doctor, and it was clear that they were all old friends, although they spoke to each other in rather formal terms. Women's voices were heard—there must have been half a dozen— from the kitchen, but no women were to be seen that evening. Some of the men smoked, a servant brought some wine and brandy, eventually we were served a traditional meal, and as soon as we had finished eating, one of the men present opened an instrument case and began tuning his setar, a small lute, like a mandolin but with a much longer neck. It had not been used in the formal concert but now I was told that it was really the truest, most characteristic instrument of Persian traditional music. It had four strings and frets and was strummed with the forefinger's long nail, melody and drone together. The tone is usually very soft but sometimes it can be loud and vigorous. The setar player followed the same plan as the ensemble in the first half of the formal concert, but the introductory composed pieces were very short, and the improvisations went on at length. The musician made a great deal of the free-rhythm avaz, in which he moved from low pitches very gradually up the scale over a good half hour, clearly watching the reactions of his audience and obviously stimulated by it to move gradually into excited and emotional musical statements. In contrast to the public concert, the nonmetric and improvised sections were clearly featured here. During the performance there was a bit of conversation, but usually in

MAJLES: A private concert event.

the way of comments on the music, such things as "He always does this very well," and "I heard so-and-so play hesar [the section being performed] quite differently last week." At the end there was a bit of conversation about music, local politics, and the weather, and the guests left, this time bidden farewell at the door by the host's wife. There was a feeling of intimacy between those present and, indeed, between them and the music; these middle-aged men were very much turned on by what they had heard. But to them it was also, importantly, an intellectual experience, as they commented on what had been played, and how the musician had followed the rules or asserted himself as an individual.

A Persian musician with setar

These musical events underscore some of the tensions that appear in Middle Eastern music. We are already familiar with several kinds of opposing relationships: between musicians and audience, soloists and accompaniment, and vocal and instrumental. But there are also other types of sometimes contradictory impulses: between composed and improvised music, music as an ecstatic or a cerebral experience, and—perhaps most characteristic of this culture area—music as a great and wonderful thing compared to something possibly dangerous and in any event to be handled with care. While my friend accompanied me to my taxi, he said: "This was really great. I'm glad you got to see this traditional expression of our culture. But don't tell people you were here. A lot of people don't approve of sessions like this." Why would he say this? We'll return to this later.

COMMON FEATURES AND DIVERSITY

Society and Culture When we speak of the Middle East as a culture area, we think of the heartland of Arabic culture—the nations of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan—and two non-Arabic nations, Turkey and Iran, constituting a northern tier. This region is actually quite diverse in culture, religion, and language— for example, Israel, surrounded by Arabic nations, is markedly different—but there are some pervasive characteristics of thought and social life that dominate the region and that have radiated for over a thousand years in several directions. Most of North Africa, parts of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and much of the South Asian subcontinent share important features of Middle Eastern culture. The most important characteristic of the area is the religion and general way of life of Islam. To synthesize a very complex situation, Islamic society may be described very briefly as monotheistic and basically egalitarian—all people are equal before God—while insisting on greatly differing cultural roles for men and women. The extended family and, in some more traditional societies, the tribe play a major role in social life. It is important, for consideration of music, that quality of speech, elegance in writing, and direct verbal exchange among individuals play a major role. It is a basis of political life that people in positions of authority—everyone from kings to religious leaders to teachers—should be directly accessible to those under them, as one looks for leadership and guidance directly to the figure of authority, not to intermediaries. After it was established in 622 A.D., Islam was quickly introduced by Arabs to Persia (Iran) and to Turkey and various other Turkic-speaking peoples, and eventually to the Balkans, North and West Africa, and large parts of Asia. With the Islamic religion came the Arabic alphabet, now long held in common by most peoples of the area and adapted to various non-Arabic languages (but abandoned in Turkey again after 1922). The Middle Eastern heartland is an area of major literary, and particularly poetic, accomplishments and of great architecture and abstract art, such as carpets, as well as grand traditions of miniature painting. But the Middle Eastern heartland is certainly not completely homogeneous. For sure, peoples who do not feel that they have much in common may be neighbors. As widely noted during the current Iraq war, some of the Middle Eastern nations were established by colonial powers without regard to ethnic boundaries; Iraq consists of opposing Sunni and Shi'ite Arabic populations along with Kurds. Throughout the area, village and nomadic cultures continue to exist alongside heavily urbanized and modernized centers. There is much cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity. To speak simply of "Arab culture" neglects the existence of the many Arabic-speaking groups, from tribal units to urban societies, differences that span the physical distance between Iraq in the East and Morocco in the West. Then there are a number of different Turkic-speaking peoples, beginning with the nation of Turkey, as well as Kurds,

Armenians, Baluchis, and many more ethnic groups. Furthermore, although most Middle Easterners are Muslims (largely Sunni Muslims in most Arabic and Turkish areas, Shi'ites in Iran and much of Iraq), there are also Armenian, Nestorian, and Assyrian Christians, as well as Jews, Baha'is, and Zoroastrians (Zoroastrianism being the original religion of Iran) scattered in small communities. Most members of non-Muslim minorities, however, which once played a prominent role in dominantly Islamic nations, since ca. 1970, have gradually moved to Europe, North America, and Israel.

The Middle East stretches in several directions and has no precise boundaries, and the musical characteristics of its center radiate thousands of miles in all directions. What we label here as the Middle Eastern culture and music area goes beyond the heartland and includes North Africa, all the way to Morocco (a largely Arabic-speaking area); the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia); and Afghanistan and Central Asia, areas with largely Persian and Turkic speakers. Furthermore, some of the characteristics of Middle Eastern music are held in common with South Asia, and it would be difficult to draw a precise line separating the musics of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Finally, because of its proximity but also because of a period

of some five hundred years of occupation by the Turkish Empire, much of the Balkan peninsula has music clearly related to and often even definitely a part of the music of the Middle East. This very large area of the world—which does not, incidentally, include the entire region of Islam, as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, and Nigeria are actually nations with the largest Muslim populations—is surely quite diverse musically, but it nevertheless holds in common certain characteristics of musical culture and musical style.

The Middle Eastern Sound There is enormous variety in Middle Eastern music, but it is fair to say that a typically Middle Eastern musical sound can be identified, just as Western musical performances may have many kinds of singing and instrumental tone color, and yet you can usually distinguish Western music when you've heard it for a few seconds. Whether classical or folk, urban or rural, Middle Eastern music has a unique sound, which comes from a combination of distinctive characteristics. Fundamentally, and in its older traditions, Middle Eastern music is almost always monophonic—which means that there is only one melody, not several melodies proceeding together, as might be the case in a European chorus, and no system of harmony to guide or accompany the melody. This statement is generally correct, but it is important to note members of an ensemble can relate and produce textural variety in a great many ways. Thus, a vocalist improvising may be accompanied by an instrument that follows a note or two behind the vocalist; or there may be parallel polyphony, that is, two voices or instruments playing the same melody at different pitch levels, say a fifth apart. Several instruments may play the same tune in basic unison, but each may perform a slightly different version, producing something called heterophony. But in principle, Middle Eastern music is monophonic. With this fundamental character goes a prevailingly ornamented style of singing and playing. Many, if not most, tones are "bent" or are embellished with trills, glissandos, or short secondary notes—all kinds of techniques to transcend a simple, straightforward rendering of a pitch. Middle Eastern mu-sicians consider that this ornamentation gives the music its special regional character and accounts for its emotional impact. The more ornamented a passage, the better and more expressive its audience perceives it to be.

MONOPHONY: One melody line is played by all musicians, with no harmonic accompaniment. PARALLEL POLYPHONY: The same melodic line is played at different volumes or pitch levels by two or more performers. HETEROPHONY: Two or more performers play the same melody, but with small differences in timing or ornamentation.

Furthermore, there is a characteristic singing style or instrumental tone color. The basic way the voice is used, the kind of sound made by singers and instrumentalists—in other words, the ideal musical sound—is one of the most important characterizing features of any musical style. It is also something that tends to be, on the whole, the same within any one culture, no matter how varied the structure of the music may otherwise be. Thus, the vocal styles of singers of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish classical music and of the many regional folk and tribal musics of the area tend to sound rather alike. It is difficult to describe this ideal sound; it is much easier to grasp it by hearing the music. But we might attempt to convey its effect by saying that a lot of it is tense sounding, often with a raspy, throaty, nasal tone, and a certain flatness. Instead of vibrato, it features copious ornamentation. Men often sing high in their range, and women tend to use the lower part of theirs. And the sounds made by instruments often parallel those of the human voice. Thus, players of the traditional spiked fiddle (kamancheh in Persian and Turkish, jouzeh in Arabic), prefer a flat, nasal tone without vibrato, in contrast to the fuller and vibrated sound of the Western violin. This panorama of musical sound goes with a musical culture in which solo performance dominates, in which singing is central, and in which improvisation plays a major role.

CHARACTERISTICS OF MIDDLE EASTERN MUSIC Monophony: One melody line is played simultaneously by all performers.

Ornamentation: Notes are bent or are embellished with trills, glissandos, or short secondary notes.

Sound Quality (Timbre): Flat, vibratoless tone, with a hard-edged, "raspy" quality.

Solo, vocal music dominates.

Improvisation is highly valued.

Instruments But instruments are certainly important as well. Just like musical styles, the entire area shares some dominant instrument types, but each country or culture has its own version or variant. Just as most musicianship involves solo performance and individual improvisation, in the development of instruments, too, regionalism and individualism dominate over widespread standardization. Speaking very generally, the most prominent throughout the Middle East are plucked instruments related to guitars, mandolins, banjos—generically called "lutes"—and a large variety of drums, usually played with the fingers. Other kinds of string instruments are also important, but wind instruments take a back seat. The most famous of Middle Eastern instruments is the oud (rhymes with "wood"), a lute with a large body and a short neck and no frets, plucked with a pick made of a feather quill. It looks very much like a European lute and, in fact, is the ancestor of that instrument widely used before 1700, whose name is derived from the Arabic al-oud. Many different types of lutes are

spread through the region, but the most widespread type has a long neck and frets, despite the fact that the modern oud has no frets (some believe that in the Middle Ages earlier ouds had frets). Beyond that, they vary enormously in size, shape, and number of strings. The most important bowed instrument type has a small round body with a skin belly and a long fingerboard with three to six strings, which is held vertically, cello style. Used in some classical traditions but most commonly a folk instrument, it has numerous variants and names (see chart). Of special interest are instruments generically labeled as "zithers": basically a flat board or box over which parallel strings are stretched. The qanun or kanun, most important in Turkey, Egypt, and North Africa, is trapezoid shaped or triangular and is plucked as it lies flat in front of the player. The trapezoid santour, considered by many a national instrument of Iran but also found elsewhere, has seventy-two strings and is played with two very light wooden hammers.

Three musicians from the United Arab Emirates playing (l to r): qanun, oud, riqq.

PROMINENT MIDDLE EASTERN MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

Chordophones Plucked Lute: Like the Western lute/guitar family of instruments, appearing in a range of sizes with fretted or fretless necks of varying length. Oud (most common); also, bouzouq (Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey), setar (Persian classical music); tar (Iran); dotor (Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Northern Iran), tambur (Turkey). Bowed lute: Small, round-bellied instrument with skin head, held vertically, and played with a bow; includes jouzeh and rebob (in Arabic cultures), kamancheh (throughout the Middle East), and qichok (Eastern sections). Zithers: Wooden instruments with strings running parallel to the soundboard. Either plucked [qanun or kanun) or struck ("hammered": santour).

Membranophones Conical hand drums (darbucca or tobl), frame drums including tambourines [duff and riqq), and goblet-shaped drums (dombok).

Aerophones End-blown flutes (ney or nai); oboelike double-reed instruments [zornah, surna); and a folk instrument type that consists of a pair of oboelike pipes (of equal or unequal length), including the Arabic arghul and zummarah and the Persian qoshmeh.

Three Unities Three prominent features and beliefs unite Middle Eastern musical culture:

A vocal and compositional style is derived from the recitation of the Holy Koran.

Music creates a kind of ecstatic, emotional bond between performer and audience.

The "suite," or collection of individual pieces played together, is the major unifying compositional principle.

Although not classified as "music" in the Middle East and kept separate from secular and even devotional music, the singing, reciting, or chanting of the Koran is structurally very much like classical nonmetric improvisation. Anyone may sing the Koran, but in the mosque professionals render the holy word. Two styles of chanting dominate: Muttaral is the unembellished, subdued, syllabic, relatively simple style; Mujawwad is emotional, ornamented, melodically complicated. Melodies are ruled by a system of modes, similar to the maqam system (we will discuss the use of maqams or modes in Middle Eastern music later in the article). There are different ways of chanting, schools with different practices, for example, the Meccan, Egyptian, Damascus, and Western North African. The chanting is improvised, but the Koran may be written with a kind of notation that indicates whether a tone is to be ornamented or not, and in which direction the melody should move. Among musicians, the explicitly musical aspect of the Koran may ostensibly play a major role, but it is important to remember that the entire system of musical values, the high value of non-metric, vocal, texted, improvised music and the lower esteem of metric, instrumental, composed music is based on the relative similarity to or difference from the sound of the Koran. Second is the importance of music as a transformer of emotion and mood. According to the musician and scholar A. Jihad Racy in his book Making Music in the Arab World "direct association between music and emotional transformation pervades the performers' and listeners' world" (2004:4). The terms tarab in Arabic and hal in Persian denote the quality in music that affects the listener and that provides a tie between audience and performer. Although in many ways, music is seen as importantly intellectual, or as serving ritual and

occupational functions, emotional expression is enormously important to Middle Eastern audiences. Third, a centerpiece of Middle Eastern classical music systems is the large suite, a composite work consisting, like the Western suite, of several contrasting movements. Their purpose may be just to provide aesthetic and intellectual entertainment, or to evoke a mood or a kind of ecstasy to the listener, or to provide background for a ceremony. But although each region of the Middle East has its own form or type, these large works—they are the equivalents of full-blown raga performances of India—serve as one of several unifying factors in the musical culture of this large area. Each type includes solo and ensemble sec-tions, many include both vocal and instrumental movements, and all have composed and improvised components. The most common type of suite found throughout the region is known as the taqsim (taksin in Turkey). It consists of two parts: an improvised, usually nonmetric solo instrumental number and the beshrav or peshrev, a metric, composed piece usually performed by an ensemble. Other types of suites, such as the Egyptian wash, the naubat found in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and suites associated with the religious practices of various Sufi sects, feature many more parts, from 8 to 12 sections, with more or less improvisation, some in rhythm and some not, some vocal, and some improvised. The Persian dashtgah (the same name is used for this extended suite as for Persian modes) is performed in five parts: pishdaramad (composed, for ensemble); chahar mezrab (composed or improvised, solo); avaz (solo, improvised, nonmetric); tasnif (metric, composed song); and reng (a light, dance-derived instrumental piece). Iraq shares a similar form, known as the "Iraqi maqam," which also centers on an extended avaz.

MUSIC IN CULTURE

Attributes of Music Middle Eastern culture has a unique view of music. Music is greatly appreciated, but there is also a kind of moral ambivalence or uncertainty about the ways and degrees to which music is acceptable. Music is seen as having a dangerously sensual component that could distract listeners from proper religious and social duties. Just why music should be held in low esteem is not quite clear, as the Holy Koran does not direct this attitude, although it cautions believers to avoid the kinds of music that lead to frivolous and lewd behavior. But whatever the roots, in Islamic society in the Middle East, music—other than the liturgical reading or singing of the Koran—must be kept far from the centers of religion. Many believe that devout Muslims

MAQAM: Generic term for mode, or system of composing melody, in Arabic classical music. The term is used throughout the Middle East, and the concept occasionally appears with different names such as dastgah and gusheh in Persian, or mugam in Azerbaijan.

should avoid music, and instruments in particular must be kept in their proper context, as must dancing. But these negative aspects of music are lessened by other strands of Islamic thought. Islam holds in high regard scholarly activity, so the study of music—particularly music theory—has a long and rich history. Sung poetry has long been highly valued in Islamic cultures. And, finally, Islamic societies are generally tolerate of non-Muslims, who can have a special role in musical culture. Lois al-Faruqi, examining Arabic legal literature, discovered a strict hierarchy in the types of music and their "acceptability" to society. It begins with musiclike utterances that are not music (e.g., Koran and religious chants) and goes on to music that is legitimate or halal: chanted poetry, music for family celebrations such as weddings, and occupational folk songs, and finally, military music. Her next category consists of a number of genres that are controversial, consisting largely of what we consider to be classical music, followed by music that is illegitimate (haram), associated with unacceptable contexts such as nightclubs. It is a fact that in traditional Middle Eastern cultures, musicians—except for those who had reached fame and stardom—were often held in low esteem. There is no tradition of instrumental religious music, and there are no concerts in the mosques. And whereas Iranians and Turks take their traditions of poetry and visual art, their miniatures, and their carpets very seriously, they usually cannot imagine that music deserves the same dignified treatment. On the other hand, Middle Eastern societies have a lot of what we consider to be music, and they are very good at it. They have found ways to reconcile their religion's ambivalence toward music and their own desire to have music. Musical activity was often turned over, as it were, to members of non-Muslim minorities, particularly Jews and to a smaller extent Christians. Of course there have always been lots of Muslim musicians, but there have always been a disproportionate number of Jewish musicians. Instrument making and selling, as well, has been in the hands of non-Muslims; for example, in Tehran around 1970, most instrument makers were Armenian Christians. If music-making was dangerous, the intellectual study of music was not, and thus there developed in Islamic society a tradition of scholarship in music theory that resulted in the writing, between 900 and 1900, of almost two thousand treatises in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. Among the philosophical and scientific branches of learning, music played a major part, and in fact, the desirability of music, the conditions under which it was socially acceptable, was the subject of many written works.

Defining Music The very definition of music as a concept is related to the Middle Eastern view of it. In English, it's a very broad concept, extending from classical, popular, and folk traditions to idiosyncratic experiments. In Middle Eastern cultures, the definition of music was narrower and more

complex. In Persian, for example, there are two terms to denote music: musiqi, derived from Greek and meaning "music," and khandan, meaning "to sing, to recite, to read." A particular sound or context of music may be considered one or the other, or in some respect both. Thus, we may say that certain sounds have more "musicness" about them than others. The kinds of music (in our sense) that are socially most acceptable are khandan. Most important, they include the reading of the Koran, which in formal situations is always sung (but in a way that emphasizes the words, always in Arabic), is nonmetric, has no instrumental accompaniment, and in accordance with certain rules, is improvised. Singing the Koran is illustrated in a short excerpt here. The more a performance of music is like that of the Koran in sound, structure, and social context, the more it is acceptable in traditional society and actually the less likely to be labeled as "music."

LISTENING GUIDE LISTEN: CHANTING OF THE HOLY KORAN Rec. Chicago, 1973 Note the many silences that break up the phrases as the performer chants the text. 0:00-0:07 Fade in 0:07-0:13 First phrase, relatively unornamented 0:14-0:17 Silence 0:18-0:31 Second phrase; slightly more ornamented 0:32-0:33 Brief silence 0:34-0:47 Third line, moving slightly up and then dropping back in pitch 0:47-0:49 Silence 0:50-1:06 Higher pitched with much more ornamentation and melisma (one syllable sung

over several notes) as the pitch drops 1:07 Breath 1:08-1:18 Completion of previous phrase 1:18-1:30 Leaps up and then descends again as the piece fades out

We can move from the Koran along several continuums to arrive at what would be considered "music" (musiqi) in the most extreme sense. These continuums move from vocal to instrumental, from nonmetric to metric to the use of repeated driving rhythmic formulas, from improvised to composed, from traditional to Westernized. Thus, the music of the Zurkhaneh, a kind of traditional gymnasium where men exercise to the chanting of a specialized singer, or morshed, who accompanies himself on drum and bells, using the latter also to direct the participants to change exercises, might come next to the religious chanting of the Mosque. Going further, we have the vocal performance of avaz, the improvised nonmetric section of a classical performance. This is a bit further removed from the ideal of khandan because it is often accompanied, emphasizes some vocal pyrotechnics, and is frequently performed by

women, as can be heard in Avaz in Shur. The same kind of music, avaz, but now performed on an instrument, would be next on the scale and definitely called musiqi. Then our continuum moves on to metric composed songs and then metric instrumental pieces, such as the introductory pishdaramad in a classical performance, and eventually to virtuosic instrumental pieces, such as the chahar mezrab (again, see Chahar Mezrab), in which rhythmic predictability is greatest on account of the use of repeated rhythmic patterns as well as steady meter. And finally, to many traditionalists, the most "undesirable" kind of music—definitely "musiqi"—is the popular music of music halls and nightclubs. After the Iranian revolution of 1978, most kinds of music, but particularly those most clearly in the "musiqi" category, were prohibited in public; but even earlier, sectors of Iranian society would support them. Leaving out the religious chants, it's clear that the most acceptable musics are those performed in private contexts, and that the more one moves into the public sphere, the closer one moves to illegitimacy.

LISTENING GUIDE LISTEN: CHAHAR MEZRAB IN MAHOUR (EXCERPT) FROM IRAN FAROMARZ PAYVAR, SANTOUR Rec. by Bruno Nettl, 1969 0:00-0:12 Energetic introduction on bass strings establishing regular beat 0:12-0:13 Short melodic phrase 0:14-0:15 Bass note figure 0:16-0:17 Phrase repeated 0:18-0:20 New phrase, slightly higher pitched 0:20-0:21 Bass notes 0:21-0:24 Descending phrase back to original starting note 0:24-0:26 Bass notes 0:26-0:31 Repeated, phrase, moving up in pitch, with second ending that drops in pitch,

leading to the next phrase 0:31-0:36 Descending phrase, left unresolved 0:37-0:42 Repeats and "resolves" to original pitch 0:42-0:47 Bass note pattern 0:49-0:57 New rolling melody 0:57-1:05 Repeats as music fades out

Musicians It may be hard to accept this concept in the modern world in which music is pervasive, in the age of star musicians, but in many parts of the world, in tradi-tional societies, musicians were and still are looked down on or regarded as a "special" group of people. In Europe, throughout much of history, one expected foreigners to take the roles of musicians. There are many traditional stories in which the musician is somehow associated with the supernatural, in league with the devil. Musical talent is often described as coming from the supernatural; the famous story of American blues performer Robert Johnson learning the guitar from the devil by traveling to a crossroads at midnight is just one of many such tales. In many folk cultures, musicians were permitted and even expected to engage in unconventional social, sexual, and even religious behavior. In the Middle East, being a musician meant that you might be a social inferior, but the classification of musicians, like the different classifications of music, balanced the contradictory beliefs that music is dangerous versus supremely desirable. In the classical-music scene of cities, one might be a professional musician or an amateur, as is the case here; but contrary to Western practice, technical competence aside, the well-trained and artistic amateur has higher status than the professional. This is based on the high value placed on freedom in the Middle East. Professional musicians may be looked down on because they must perform when ordered and play whatever their patron wishes to hear at whatever length is desired. Amateurs, who play for their own pleasure and for their friends, may make these decisions themselves, particularly those that involve the choice of modal system and improvisation. Considering that in Persian music the selection of mode, maqam, or dastgah, has a lot to do with the musician's mood, as each mode has its own character, the notion of freedom gives amateur status its higher prestige. And because improvised music has the greatest prestige but requires the greatest degree of freedom for the performer, amateurs (assuming they are really as well trained and as knowledgeable as professionals) are able to indulge their own musical desires best, and thus to bring to the audience a feeling of well-being and even ecstasy (tarab in Arabic, hal in Persian). One group of individuals in Islamic society is particularly associated with music: the Sufis. Sufism is a mystical movement in Islam, which is able to overcome the disapproval of music by saying, in effect, "Music is just another way of knowing and being close to God." Thus many Middle Eastern musicians, if they are Muslims, are members of Sufi sects. In rural or small-town culture of the Middle East, folk songs are not principally performed by the general pop-ulation (as they are in some of the world's rural societies), but rather by specialist singers and

MUSIQI: Classical and folk forms of music in the Middle East that have less prestige than the religious Khandan. KHANDAN: To sing, recite, or read, literally. In practice, the highest form of Middle Eastern music, used primarily in chanting the texts of the Koran.

instrumentalists. They are not not known as "musicians" per se, but each is a specialist in a particular genre and is thus designated and expects to be paid for performing. In his study of the Khorasan music, Stephen Blum identified a large number of musician types, recognized as such by society, each of whom specialized in one genre or context. The naqqal recited the Shahnameh in teahouses. The darvish (any of a number of different kinds of individuals all associated with Sufism) might recite the same work, and recent religious poetry, on the streets. The bakhshi performed narratives dealing with war and romance at weddings and similar events. The rouzeh-khan performed rouzeh, songs of the martyrdom of Hossein; the monaqeb-khan sang about the virtues of Ali and his descendants. The motreb performed vocal and instrumental music at teahouses; the asheq sang romantic narratives in towns and encampments. One person could perform several functions and have several of these designations, but the point was that none of them was associated with the whole of "music" as such; none was a "musician." The relationship between art and folk music is quite different from that found in traditional Western Europe, where folk music is ordinarily performed by people who are not specialists. In the Middle East, our Western ideas are turned topsy-turvy: folk music is the province of the specialist, and art music ideally of the amateur.

Sufi “whirling dervishes” dance in circles during a Sema ceremony in Konya, Turkey.

Looking back to the performances that I attended, the last one—a private concert—is the most socially acceptable, as it was part of a tradition called dowreh, a small group of men who

meet periodically for a special purpose such as reading the Koran or poetry to each other or hearing music. This group is often based on an extended family, and certainly its members belong to the same social class and perhaps even occupation. They feel very close to each other and depend on the ambience provided by this sense of belonging and of privacy. In earlier times, music was often heard in these venues, and the notion of music as dangerous accompanies the concept of keeping it within a closed social circle. Traditionally, the most acceptable music was that performed privately, improvised by a soloist, perhaps a highly accomplished amateur, who brings a sense of ecstasy in which the world is temporarily transformed to the music. Although the improvised sections of a program were very much controlled in the public concert and were relatively short compared to the composed materials, improvisation played a much greater role in a small private performance.

MAKING MUSIC

Melodic Modes: Maqam, Makam, Mugam, and Dastgah The most important structuring device for composers and improvisers is the modal system. Musicians and musicologists argue unendingly about the definition of "mode," but for our purposes, we may say that it is a pattern or set of rules for composing melody. Modes are found in many of the world's culture areas, but particularly in European art music of earlier periods, in South and Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and of course, the Middle East. In the Arabic world, the term for mode is maqam (makam in Turkish). In the Caucasus, the term for the Azerbaijani version of the system is mugam, and in Central Asian Uzbekistan, a more limited body of material called Shashmakom (six makams) is used. In Iran, it is the term dastgah. A unit like a maqam has a particular scale, that is, a collection or group of pitches (somewhat like the Western major and minor scales) from which the composer draws and is limited to when creating one piece. Generally speaking, the Arabic and Turkish manifestations of Middle Eastern classical music constitute one stream, and the forms found in Iran, Azerbaijan, and Afghanistan together form a second stream. The tones are separated by distances in pitch called intervals. In Western major and minor scales, the consecutive intervals are major and minor seconds, also called whole- and half-tones. (You can identify them on the piano: Half-tones are made by playing adjacent keys, whole-tones by skipping a key, but be sure to include the black keys in your calculation.) In Middle Eastern music, however, there are, besides these intervals known in the West, others not compatible with the standard Western system. They are three-quarter-tones, slightly larger than our halftone, and five-quarter-tones, slightly larger than our whole-tone. The scales of maqams and dastgahs are made up of various combinations of these intervals.

But there is more to a maqam: Along with a scale, there are typical kinds of order in which the tones should appear and short three- or four-note motifs or musical gestures that a composer or improviser must use, bringing them back every ten, twenty, or thirty seconds to maintain the proper character of the mode. To play just anything with the use of a prescribed scale is not enough. Every Arabic or Turkish maqam or Persian dastgah has a name. Some give place of origin (somewhat like the Greek modes). Thus, there is Isfahan (name of a city in Iran), Rak (probably a Persian form of the Indian word "raga," thus indicating Indian origin), Hijaz (a section of Saudi Arabia), Nahawand (a village in Turkey), and so on. The name may instead suggest something of the character of the music: Homayoun (royal), Shur (salty), and the like. In some cases, notions from technical music theory play a role, for example, Mokhalef ("opposite," in-dicating that the scale is, as it were, turned around), Chahargah ("fourth place," or "fourth fret"), Segah ("third place"), Panjgah ("fifth place"). The systems of Turkish, Arabic, and Persian music are quite different, but they share many of these terms, a preponderance of which comes from the Persian language. Although it is impossible to know whether the name of a maqam or dastgah really indicates musical relationship to a place or nonmusical character, there is no doubt that Middle Eastern musicians consider each mode to have a particular character. And so, although much of the music of this area is improvised, it is a matter of music-making within rather specific sets of rules and patterns. If you are performing in one mode, you may wish to change, or modulate, to another, and in Arabic and Turkish music, each maqam has certain others to which a musician would typically move. Thus, if you perform in Nahawand, you are likely to move to Rast, Hijaz, and Ajam, but not typically to others. In twentieth-century Iranian music, the system has become formalized, with each dastgah including within its purview several gushehs, units that are like the Arabic maqams and are performed one after the other. If, for instance, you want to play the dastgah of Chahargah, you will not only tend to move to particular other modal units as in Arabic music, but you must also select your modulations from the gushehs belonging to Chahargah: Zabol, Mokhalef, Hesar, Mansuri, and others. Examples of some of the Persian dastgahs are provided in the accompanying recordings: Shur in Avaz in Shur, Mahour (Chahar Mezrab) and Chahargah (Daramad of Chahargah).

INTERVAL: The distance between two pitches.

LISTENING GUIDE LISTEN: ILLUSTRATIONS OF MAJOR MAQAMS Performed by A. Jihad Racy on bouzouq and nei Listen to this recording to hear a number of the most important Arabic maqams: Nahawand, Rast, Bayati, Hijazkar, Sika, and Saba. Telling them apart is not easy for the uninitiated listener, but one may learn to identify a maqam by its special quirks such as the three-quarter tone that sounds slightly out of tune to the Western ear in Rast; the augmented second of Hijazkar, making it sound, again only to Western ears, sad and exotic; the compressed diminished fourth in Saba; the fact that in Sika it is hard to decide which tone is the fundamental tone, or tonic; and the rather conventional Western minor sound of Nahawand. TIME MAQAM 0:00-0:20 Nahawand

0:23-1:06 Rast (2 sections)

1:10-2:05 Bayati (3 sections)

2:10-3:16 Hijazkar (3 sections)

3:20-4:00 Sika (2 sections)

4:05-4:46 Saba (2 sections), played on the nei

Rhythmic Structure The modal system of Middle Eastern music is complex and fascinating, but rhythm, which usually is harder to explain, is equally complicated. Take the matter of metric and nonmetric music. In standard Western music, we assume that there is always a metric cycle of beats, possibly with subdivisions, which organizes the rhythmic experience. It is usually rather simple, with the main stress on the first beat and secondary stress halfway through; for example:

1 2 3 4 > >

- or -

1 2 3 4 5 6 > >

In twentieth-century Western classical music, other cycles and combinations are often found; in liturgy, such as the Gregorian chant of the Catholic church, or Jewish cantillation, there may be no meter. And so we are tempted to classify non-Western music simply as either metric or nonmetric. But Middle Eastern music actually has a more complicated system of rhythm. For one thing, it may be metric, or nonmetric, but often is somewhere in between. One can say about the chanting of the Koran that it is non-metric, but when we get to singing in the

Zurkhaneh, by a morshed who chants epic poetry to percussion accompaniment, we have to admit that although it too is nonmetric, it has more of a metric feel. The same is true of the improvised taqsims of Arabic and Turkish music, or the Persian avaz. In a performance of Midddle Eastern music, various degrees of "metricness" can be found at various times, and a performer can switch almost unnoticed between short metric and nonmetric passages. In Arabic and Turkish classical music, metric music is often organized by rhythmic modes of a sort. These are not too different from the talas of Indian music and involve a series of beats—up to twenty or twenty-five, but usually from seven to sixteen—some of which are stressed to provide a set of subdivisions. Generically called iq'a or wazn in Arabic and usul in Turkish, these modes have names, like the melodic maqams, and serve as an underlying structure articulated by the drum, which uses different kinds of strokes on the drumhead for stressed and unstressed beats. The melodies that the drums accompany fit in with the rhythmic mode, but sometimes so subtly that one can hardly tell just what the relationship is. Just as the concept of melodic mode has been widespread, extending from Europe (in the Middle Ages) to Southeast Asia, systems of rhythmic modes are found in the same area. But they have been abandoned in European music and now play less of a role in the Middle East than formerly; they remain important only in the two classical music systems of India.

The Forms and Processes of Improvisation One of the central features of Middle Eastern music is improvisation, the creation of music in the course of performance. But keep in mind this important distinction: Some Middle Eastern music is improvised, but much of it is composed, without the use of notation, but memorized and handed down through oral tradition. There are also certain kinds of music in which some elements remain the same from one performance to the next, whereas other aspects are created on the spot. A lot of music can be seen as somewhere between absolute improvisation—the performer has "total" freedom, there is no predictability—and absolute restriction by a composer, with the performances being totally identical. In most of Western classical musical culture, improvisation is regarded as a craft, subordinate to the concept of composition and performance carefully worked out in advance. But it is a central feature of many of the world's musics. A great deal of older traditional African music was improvised in the sense that musicians created innumerable variations on a short repeated theme, and possibly no sharp distinction was made between performance of memorized music and the spinning-out of improvised variations. In jazz, however, a set of chords, or a popular tune, becomes the basis of improvisation. In the gamelan music of Java and Bali, members of the ensemble improvise variations on a theme that is being played at the same time by other instruments. In the classical musics of India and the Middle East, improvised and composed musics coexist, and the two are regarded as distinct processes. The general system of Indian improvisation is rather related to that of the Middle East, except that

different types of improvisation—slow, fast, metric, and nonmetric (vistar alap, jor, jhala in North India; alapana, tanam, kalpana svaram in South India)—are recognized. Such differences are found in the Middle East as well, but they are not recognized by separate terminology.

LISTENING GUIDE

LISTEN: TAQSIM IN THE MAWAM OF NAHAWAND A. Jihad Racy 0:01-0:25 The initial section of the taqsim. The performer begins in the

low part of the range, in moderate tempo, and gradually moves higher, and finally moves down to a characteristic closing formula, then pauses.

0:26-0:30 Two very brief groups of transitional, notes which the performer seems to be and using to help him create the beginning of the next section. 0:31-0:34 0:35-1:00 The second main section. Some of the musical gestures of

the first section reappear here, but as a whole it is pitched higher, moves a bit more rapidly, and moves between the higher and lower tones more rapidly.

1:00-1:04 Closing formula, very similar to that of 0:23-0:25.

As in all musics in which there is improvisation, Middle Eastern musicians do not simply perform any old thing that comes into their minds. Their improvised pieces have more or less predictable form and musical content. The rules by which one improvises fall into two categories: form and the overall design of a performance. The most widely known Middle Eastern improvised forms are the taqsim of Arabic and Turkish music and the avaz of Persian. An Arabic or Turkish taqsim or a Persian avaz—or any of the other improvised genres—is cast in a mode (maqam, makam, or dastgah), which tells the performer the scales, the identities of the pitches, and the typical motifs that must be used. Moreover, the rhythmic structure—not consistently metric, though metric bits may appear—is predetermined. Beyond this, the performer, has certain choices, but if we analyze many recorded performances, we see that they follow a limited set of patterns. Performers may decide to move from the main mode into others, and in the case of Persian music, one is almost obliged to do so, moving gradually from a low part of the range to a higher part. They may also decide how many and which secondary modes to modulate into, in what order, and just how long to stay with each one. The overall form is set, but the details are determined by the improviser. But beyond the matter of overall form, there is a matter of style on a more detailed level. It is this aspect of the music that causes it to sound "Middle Eastern" or "Iranian," or from a particular place or performer. It is the way in which musical materials are handled, repeated, changed, developed, and alternated. In Middle Eastern music, it is important to repeat a motif two or three times but not more. It is important to present a highly characteristic motif occasionally and to surround it with more general material. Most melodic movements should

take place in accordance with the scale of the maqam or dastgah, with few large intervals that skip tones. It is expected that the music be ornamented, that one moves from lower to higher areas of the scalar range. These are general rules of style, but how they are applied in detail is up to the improviser. And yet Arabic and Persian improvisations have a very consistent style, balancing freedom and restriction.

Learning to Improvise Much of the consistency of a system of improvisation is due to the way it is taught and learned. How does one learn to improvise? In Arabic music, many musicians learn by hearing the many variations intoned in the chanting of the Koran and the call to prayer. In music lessons, improvisational bits are offered by the teacher and repeated and memorized by the student. Some Syrian and Iraqi teachers move through the body of music over months or years, maqam by maqam, explaining and demonstrating to the student what is essential, obligatory, and optimal. In South Indian music, a series of exercises that provide the basic musical vocabulary for improvisation are studied and internalized. In jazz, solitary hearing and memorizing of recorded improvisation may alternate with sitting in with and receiving occasional direction and encouragement from masters. In all cases, musicians learn fundamental materials on which improvisation is based and techniques of what one may do with this material to arrive at an acceptable improvised performance. But of course, the outcome is also determined by the individuality of a player's or singer's technique, experience in the world of music, and mood. Persian music offers an excellent illustration of the relationship between basic material to be learned and the improvised performance. Primarily, Iranian musicians study the repertory of music known as the radif, or more properly, the radif of their teacher. A radif consists of some three hundred pieces of music, most of them quite short—thirty seconds to four minutes— and they are organized in the twelve modes, or dastgahs, of Persian music. Thus, each mode has a section of the radif devoted to it. For example, the dastgah of Shur has some thirty pieces. The first is Shur itself, that is, a piece that has the main scalar and thematic characteristics of Shur. Then come others clearly related to Shur, but with their own peculiarities; these are called gushehs (see diagram). Some radifs have the same names as Arabic maqams, and there is reason to believe that the way Arabic musicians combined maqams informally in a performance of a taqsim, for example, was codified by Iranian musicians into the much more formal radif.

RADIF: In Persian classical music, the body of music consisting of 250-300 short pieces, memorized by students and then used as the basis or point of departure for improvised performance. GUSHEH: Subdivision of a dastgah, and smallest constituent part of the radif, in Persian classical music.

RADIF

DASTGAH

MAIN SCALE (in daramad)

PRINCIPAL MOTIF

RELATED GUSHEHS (each with characteristic scale and motif)

A full radif takes some eight to ten hours to play through. A student memorizes it, over a period of maybe four years. The teacher does not directly "teach" improvisation, but the radif itself, having been internalized, teaches a musician how to improvise, because it includes the basic materials—scales and requirements of the modes or dastgahs, typical themes, and musical ideas—that are the basis of the musical system, and it repeats and juxtaposes these materials in many ways to provide samples and models for the improviser to use. It provides ideas of how to take a musical motif and transform it into various versions, ways of moving gradually from metric to nonmetric rhythm, of repeating and then extending a theme, and of when to present a memorable theme or motif of highly distinct character and when to "noodle around." The content and structure of the radif isn't really different from the improvised avaz, but once you are an accomplished musician, you should not perform the radif in public, but rather practice it and use it as a model, a point of departure, for improvisation.

LISTENING GUIDE LISTEN: RADIF OF NOUR-ALI BOROUMAND This recording illustrates the Persian radif; two of the three hundred or so pieces are provided. The excerpt gives the beginning, or "daramad," of the Dastgah of Chahargah (0:00-0:50), which provides the musical motif that should dominate improvised performances of that dastgah. This motif begins, and in shortened form ends, the first section ("first daramad," the performer an-nounces) and also begins the second. If you remember this motif (which might remind you a bit of the beginning of "Happy Birthday," but is more complex, serious and in a somewhat minor key), you can follow where it appears, and how it is transformed, in improvised performances.

The Persian radif, with its large, formal structure, fits into the Iranian proclivity for complex constructions in the arts. The complicated carpet design; the tendency of literary artists to produce grand, compound works, including a very long national epic; and the complexity of the imperial political system illustrate this tendency. But until the twentieth century, musical performance, which did not enjoy the same prestige as visual art and literature, was an exception to this rule. In the mid-nineteenth century, Iranians became acquainted with

European music, as the emperor brought French and Italian musicians to modernize the music of his military establishment. Iranian musicians saw Western music as a grand design—a system with a unified theory, notation, and great control over the listening environment—and they also saw Western musicians as more respected members of their society. This apparently stimulated them to develop the radif, a large, complex work. Organized by musicians who were members of the middle class, it reflected certain important values of Iranian culture: the tension between equality and hierarchy (that is, equality of all before God in Islam and the hierarchy of a political empire), the value of individualism and surprise, and a characteristic way of ordering the smaller parts of an event. Take an example from traditional Iranian social life as a model. In ordinary relationships between members of a family or close friends, what is important comes first: a father goes through the door before his son, an older friend before the younger, and this is done without much ceremony. In a more formal relationship, people shuffle around deciding who should go first (although it really has been settled in advance that the older, more prestigious, higher placed must precede). In a truly formal event, the amount of introductory behavior preceding the main substance is substantial. A formal dinner, for example, will be preceded by hours of chitchat and tea-with-cookies. The radif is like the family: what is important, main dastgahs, gushehs, motifs, comes first. When the radif is transformed into a more formal performance, the most prestigious part, the improvised avaz, comes later and is preceded by less-prestigious composed compositions. In this way, the radif itself and the music derived from it reflect important values of Iranian culture and principles of social behavior.

LISTENING GUIDE LISTEN: SIX EXCERPTS OF IMPROVISATION BASED ON THE DARAMAD OF CHAHARGAH

TIME INSTRUMENT

(PERFORMER) MAIN MOTIF APPEARS

SPECIAL RHYTHMIC DEVICES

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

0:01-0:36 Santour (Heydari) 0:01 Kereshmeh: EQ EQ EEQ Q E E = eight note; Q = quarter note

Strong, uses kereshmeh rhythm—appears 3 times in a row; deliberate tempo, pause at 0:24

0:38-1:15 Kamancheh (Bahari)

0:38, 1:00 metric Begins slow, lyrical; at 0:58, begins metric rendition of main motif.

1:16-2:00 Violin (Shirinabadi) 1:16, 1:53 nonmetric Low-pitched, deliberate, very rubato, ornamented; note pizzicato or plucked notes (1:25; 1:39); ascending melodic sequence (a few notes repeated at increasingly higher pitch levels)

2:04-2:58 Violin (Shirinabadi) 2:05 twice, 2:45

nonmetric Slow, deliberate; low-pitched; very rubato; note double-stops (at approx. 2:15, 2:20)

3:00-3:55 Setar (Ebadi) 3:22, 3:30 metric, chahar mezrab style

Changeable mood; begins metric, moves (3:22) to slow, lyrical, and (3:44) to rapid-fire delivery in style of Chahar mezrab.

4:00-4:30 Setar (Ebadi) 4:00, 4:12 kereshmeh Strong, rhythmically emphatic. Uses kereshmeh rhythm: at 4:00, 4:12

HISTORY Because Middle Eastern music, like most musics, lives in oral tradition, we know much more about its workings in the twentieth century than we do about its history. But as the Middle East generally has long been an area of special interest to Europeans and Americans, its history has been greatly explored by archaeologists and historians. We have some knowledge of its cultures long before the Christian era, and we know a bit about its music history. Archaeological sites indicate that the entire area had a large variety of instruments some three thousand years ago. There is evidence that the Sumerians, around 2000 B.C.E., had a rather complex system of musical notation. The Bible suggests that in ancient Jewish society music was regarded as a joyful activity, and that maybe the ambivalence about music that is characteristic of Islam came to this culture area later on. We can get some sense of the age of the Middle Eastern system of modes by looking at the modal system of ancient Greece, which was culturally closely associated with Egypt and Persia at that time. The ancient Greek modes— Dorian, Aeolian, Phrygian, Lydian, and so on—whose names are still used in modem modal analysis in Western music, appear to have been units somewhat like maqams or dastgahs. They were scales, but were named after regions and probably derived from local folk-tune types, and they were thought to have some specific character. Though it was only in Greece that theorists and philosophers wrote about the modes, it seems likely that this system of making music was known throughout a far broader area, probably all the way to India, and that the present-day modal systems of South and West Asia are descendants of long-standing traditions. After Islam became established about 622 C.E., empires led successively by Arabic, Persian, and Turkish peoples dominated the area for a thousand years. At the courts of these empires, art-music establishments were developed (despite the Muslim ambivalence about music), and famous individual musicians such as the Arabic Yunus al-Katib (d. 765) and Ibrahim al-Mausili (d. 850) and the Persian Barbod (who lived in the tenth century C.E.) flourished even during the Middle Ages. Except for verbal descriptions, we have no knowledge of the sound of their music. But the most important musical heritage of these earlier periods in Islamic history was the immense body of theory and philosophy of music that was produced in many hundreds of treatises written by musicians, scientists, and philosophers, many of them attached to the courts of the Middle Eastern empires. These treatises dealt principally with two topics, the value and acceptability of music and the tuning of the modal scales. Interestingly, however, the precise measurements of pitch that these treatises imply may never have played much of

a role in performance, in which intonation is less emphasized than the appropriate musical themes and motifs. Among the authors of these treatises, however, are some of the great names in Arabic philosophy—Al-Farabi, Al-Kindi, and Ebn-e Sina (Avicenna)— who included music among the components of a broader system of knowledge. One important aspect of Middle Eastern music history is its interaction with neighboring culture areas. In the Middle Ages, particularly because of the interaction of Muslims and Christians in Spain, Arab scholars and musicians transmitted Arabic (and ancient Greek) ideas and concepts to the Western world. One concrete result was the introduction of the oud, the Arabic lute with short neck, to Europe; it became the lute that was so widely used in art music of the Renaissance. Looking in another direction, in the sixteenth century, the Moghul emperor Akbar brought Persian musicians to India, and they are said to have had a major impact, establishing a musical system in north India that was distinct from the possibly older South Indian or Karnatak music. From the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, the dominant power in the Middle East, the Turkish empire centered in Istanbul, had close cultural relations with Europe, and by the nineteenth century, Western musical culture began to play a major role. Western institutions such as public concerts and opera, conservatories of music, notation, and musical technology, along with Western ideas about music such as the dominance of composed pieces as compared to improvisations, began to affect the Middle East substantially. One of the major events in the twentieth century was the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The gathering of representatives of Jewish populations from many cultures and countries stimulated the development of a distinctive folk and popular music culture based mainly on a combination of Eastern European and Middle Eastern elements. At the same time, the arrival of many Jewish musicians from Middle Eastern Muslim countries encouraged the preservation and also the interaction of Middle Eastern traditions within Israel.

Vernacular and Popular Music At the other end of the spectrum of acceptability from religious and court music are the many folk and popular styles. Perhaps best known in the West is the music for belly dancing, performed by a group called takht (literally, "platform"), which consists ordinarily of a hammered dulcimer, a violin, a lute, a goblet-shaped drum, and a tambourine. The music is rapid and is accompanied by fast, complex, but repeated drum figures. Although belly dancing has recently become a genre of popular entertainment, it was traditionally a high art performed by highly trained dancers and musicians. And although Western music in its many aspects—concerts and opera, nightclubs, rock groups and jazz ensembles, instruments, notation, the mass media—is making the Middle East in certain ways a subdivision of the Western cultural system, many forms of music combine traditional styles of music with features of Western music to create new forms. Among the

characteristic kind of venue is the traditional music hall, as found in some of the large cities in the period around 1970. Here a large audience (mostly of men, and often from the same social or occupational group) may see a long series of entertainment numbers while eating a standard supper and drinking beer. The entertainment may consist of some twenty to thirty acts, some of them political or humorous skits, others folk dances and acrobatics, but the most prominent being musical. Typically, a female singer will be accompanied by a small ensemble of traditional and Western instruments that plays in unison with her while also providing some very simple, rudimentary Western harmony. Some of these singers went far beyond those music halls. In the period since World War II, a small number of Middle Eastern singers—more women than men—gained great prominence, contradicting the Islamic ambivalence toward music and particularly toward public performance by women. Most famous by far among them was Umm Kulthum (1908-1975), who is heard singing in a short excerpt on “YA ZALIMNI”. An Egyptian musician who achieved international prominence, Kulthum became a star of radio and film as well as of stage and the record industry. Her songs, composed for her by prominent composers, became widely known throughout the Islamic world and thus qualify as "popular" music. But her singing was based on classical Arabic models and included improvisatory passages. At the same time, she was accompanied by orchestras consisting in large part of Western instruments playing in a European-derived style. For almost four decades, she gave monthly concerts lasting four hours. Other singers, far less well known, such as the Egyptian Abdel-Wahab, the Lebanese Fairuz, and the Iranian Delkash, achieved similar fame on a more local level. The words of these songs are about love, devotion to God, protest against unfairness in society and politics, and the expression of grief. The structure of the poetry greatly affects the rhythmic form of the melodies. Songs of the sort heard in the music halls could also be heard on radio or bought on 45 rpm disks, and some come from films. They constitute the Middle Eastern version of urban popular music, a type of music that almost everywhere combines indigenous and Western elements and employs certain Western instruments and Western harmony. In general, the popular music of the Middle Eastern cities has a homogeneous style; what one could hear in Cairo, Beirut, and Tehran in the 1970s was very much one kind of music. The culture of the Middle East of centuries past was a relatively unified combination of the confluence of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and other elements, and its popular music in the twentieth century reflects this homogeneity.

LISTENING GUIDE LISTEN: YA ZALIMNI (EXCERPT) Sung by Umm Kulthum, with orchestral accompaniment 0:00-0:12 Fade in on first verse; voice paralleled by string section of orchestration with

flute and Middle Eastern sounding percussion. At approx. 0:05, a member of the audience calls out in response to the music.

0:12-0:14 Short instrumental tag 0:14-0:39 New verse 0:39-0:41 Last word of vocal line is repeated by audience 0:26-0:27 Again, end of vocal line is repeated by audience 0:30-0:31 Slightly more ornamentation in vocal line 0:36-0:39 Same instrumental tag is performed as at 0:12 to fade out

In the period after 1980, a number of styles of popular or vernacular music reflected modern social agendas. The genre known as rai, found in Algeria and Morocco, combines traditional singing styles, vocal virtuosity, and Arabic modes with Western-style chordal accompaniment on synthesizer. In Turkey, a music called Arabesk draws young people back from strictly Western popular music to a more traditional Middle Eastern sound, as a way of symbolizing the Turkish people's association with Islam and to older cultural traditions of the area. Throughout the area, popular music combines Western-derived elements—simple chordal harmony, tuning of instruments to the European tempered scale, amplification and echo-chambers, Western keyboard synthesizers, guitars, and violins—with traditional Middle Eastern sounds, nonmetric singing with heavy ornamentation usually alternating with metric pieces with a strong beat articulated by traditional hand drums, with words expressing allegiance to traditional cultural values and anticolonial political agendas. Middle Eastern musicians and their music have played a major role in the development of the phenomenon known as "world music" or "world beat," in combination with elements from modern American, African, and Indian film music. At the same time, music has played and continues to play an important role in anticolonial and nationalistic movements. Despite a growing accept-ance of music, certain Islamist fundamentlist movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan have militated against the practice of music in public.